Updated September 2026
A metes and bounds legal description reads like a set of walking directions written in the surveying dialect of English deeds — often a single unbroken paragraph, sometimes over a century old, with punctuation and phrasing that hasn't changed much since. Once you know the pattern, pulling out the calls to enter into the plotter is mechanical. Here's how to parse one.
Almost every metes and bounds description has three sections: (1) a point of beginning (POB) tied to some physical or recorded reference — "beginning at an iron pin set at the northwest corner of the lands of..." — (2) a sequence of calls, each one a bearing and a distance, usually joined by the word "thence" ("thence North 45°30'00" East, 150.25 feet to an iron pin"), and (3) a closing statement confirming the calls return to the beginning — "thence to the point of beginning" or "containing 2.3 acres, more or less." Only the middle section — the calls — gets entered into this tool; the POB description and closing statement are context, not data.
A call looks like: "thence North 62°15'30" West, 220.40 feet to an iron pin." Breaking it down: North and West are the two quadrant references; 62°15'30" is the angle (62 degrees, 15 minutes, 30 seconds) measured from North toward West; 220.40 feet is the distance; and "to an iron pin" describes the physical monument found or set at the resulting corner — useful for a surveyor re-locating the corner on the ground, but not needed for plotting the shape. In this tool's input form, that call becomes: quadrant N, 62°, 15', 30", quadrant W, distance 220.40, unit ft.
Bearings use base-60 sub-units the way clock time does: 60 seconds make a minute, 60 minutes make a degree. "45°30'00"" is 45.5°, not 45.3° — a common misreading. The angle in a quadrant bearing is always between 0° and 90°; anything that would be 90° or more is written from the other reference direction instead (due east is conventionally "N 90°00'00" E," and you'll essentially never see "N 91° E" or similar in a properly written deed — if you do, treat it as a red flag that the description was miscopied somewhere).
Most 20th- and 21st-century U.S. deeds use feet, but older deeds — particularly pre-1900 rural descriptions — sometimes use chains (1 chain = 66 feet, the original surveyor's chain length) or rods/poles/perches (1 rod = 16.5 feet, a quarter-chain). If a description reads "thence North 20° East, 4.5 chains," convert to feet (4.5 × 66 = 297 ft) before entering it — this tool's unit selector currently supports feet and meters, so older units need converting first. Metric descriptions (meters) are handled natively per call.
Many descriptions, especially along roads or curved property lines, include a call like "thence along a curve to the left, having a radius of 300.00 feet, an arc length of 145.20 feet, a central angle of 27°43'12", and a chord bearing North 15°10'00" East, 143.85 feet." That's a curved segment, not a straight bearing-and-distance call — this tool currently plots straight lines only. A workable approximation for a rough sketch is to enter the chord bearing and chord distance (the straight line connecting the curve's two endpoints) in place of the actual arc, understanding that this slightly straightens a segment that's really curved, and will slightly distort area and closure results for that one segment. Monument references ("to an iron pin," "to a stone found," "to a 24-inch oak") are location notes for a field surveyor and can be ignored for plotting purposes — they don't affect the geometry, only how a surveyor would physically re-locate the corner.
Consider this description: "Beginning at an iron pin at the southeast corner of the tract; thence North 89°30'00" East, 200.00 feet to an iron pin; thence South 00°15'00" East, 150.00 feet to an iron pin; thence South 89°30'00" West, 200.00 feet to an iron pin; thence North 00°15'00" West, 150.00 feet to the point of beginning, containing 0.69 acres, more or less." Stripped to just the calls, that's exactly the four-row example pre-loaded in the plotter — and the description's own closing note ("containing 0.69 acres") matches what the tool calculates (≈0.6887 acres), which is itself a useful cross-check that the calls were transcribed correctly.
The most frequent errors when copying calls by hand: flipping a quadrant letter (N for S, or E for W — this mirrors the whole remaining shape), transposing two digits in a distance (150.25 becomes 152.05), and dropping or misreading a minutes/seconds value in dense old typewritten or handwritten text. All of these show up clearly as a large closure error once plotted — see the closure error guide for how to use that signal to catch them.